by Alec Waugh
In a last long sip Judy drank off her cocktail.
“Your not having one leaves one spare, be a dear and get it for me, before the others come.”
He had drunk a bare quarter of his highball, but he filled his glass. He might not have another chance. He had need of it tonight. That mist, if only it could be dissolved. How could it though? Not in an odd five minutes such as this. It needed leisure and peace of mind, an opportunity to expand, a certainty that one would not be disturbed; that or one sudden, one dramatic incident that would act like a blow upon a lock, a splintering and a shattering of the barrier. That way perhaps it might be done. But these short intervals, driving to a neighbor’s house, driving from the golf course, no, it could not be done like that.
From the courtyard outside came the sound of a car backing. The first guests already. What chance had he and Judy under these circumstances of getting back in tune?
There were eighteen guests at dinner. He rolled the bite of the clean cold wine upon his tongue. His confidence was mounting, glass by glass. The presence of Nina at his side increased his confidence.
“I’ve been missing you. It hasn’t seemed right going around with Judy and you not here,” he said.
She smiled.
“That’s nice of you. I’d heard you’d come. I’d wondered how you were getting on. How have you, by the way?”
She looked at him very straight as she said that. He knew what she had in mind. He wished that he could answer her directly. More than anything during this last month he had missed a confidante, someone with whom he could be open, or at least someone who guessing at his problem, without making reference to it, could have adjusted herself to him. More than once had he thought of Nina, remembering how that night at Eze, they had stood together leaning against the battlements, looking towards the Esterds. She had said nothing direct to him that night, but she had guessed his mood. He wished that tonight he could give her the clue to what had happened here.
“Maybe I’ll tell you afterwards,” he said.
Afterwards. But when that time came, there might not be the same need of understanding. He would have re-established himself in his own esteem. He lifted his glass to his lips and emptied it. If only it could all work out the way he’d planned. If it did, maybe he could break down that barrier between himself and Judy.
As Parker had prophesied, the moment the men joined the women after dinner, Richard suggested charades.
“This is the only place in the world where I can be a child. Please don’t deny me my puerilities.”
There was no opposition.
Nina and Judy were the captains. Francis was on Judy’s side with Marion and Sir Henry. They tossed up as to which side should go out first and Judy won.
It was the moment for which Francis had been waiting. They went into the small “tea” room to decide their plan. There was, as he had known there would be, the invariable uncertain pause, while each waited for someone else to proffer a suggestion. He waited, then proffered his.
“I’ve an idea,” he said. “Let’s fool them. Let’s act two words, one of which they’ll spot so easily that they won’t bother to look for the second one. We did it at home once and it worked well. Suppose, for instance, we were to act a gangster story. Everyone would think the word was “gangster”; we’ll be careful to bring in the two words, “gang” and “stir” but if we also act another word, say “surprise,” there won’t be one of them that’ll guess it.”
There was a murmur of approval. Nobody had any counter-suggestion. They were all relieved that someone had an idea ready-made. A good idea, too. Chicago gangsters had become news in England. The Edgar Wallace boom was in full swing. It was an idea that gave everybody scope.
Haltingly, Francis outlined the plot, as though he were making it up as he went along.
“Suppose,” he said, “you were to have someone bumped off in a night club. We could have a bootlegger decoyed there by a gangster’s moll. That could be the first act. In the second we could have the gangster’s funeral. That would give us a chance for quite a lot of backchat, burying bouquets and all that. At the end of the scene, we could have the murdered man’s friends getting on to the girl and threatening to throw vitriol in her face, if she doesn’t give away her man. Then, in the last scene, we could have the plot to trap the murderer; but he could have been warned and instead he’d kidnap the girl and take her for a ride. That’s as a kind of rough framework, I mean to say,” he finished lamely.
He was careful not to do more than outline a plot, so that the others could fill in the details, could work up their own parts in the way they wanted.
It was a plot that appealed to all of them. Each began to improvise.
“I could be the rival gangster.”
“I could be his wife or mother.”
Francis was careful not to take too much of the action on himself. He had no wish to be accused of being selfish. He stood more chance of stealing the show were his part a small one. The murderer would be “off” most of the time. He suggested himself for the part. He had his own scheme of how to make the part effective. He could drop into a Bowery accent, use Bowery slang, talk the kind of American that the English seemed to believe was talked by all Americans.
Marion was to be his moll.
“What’ll I wear?” she said.
He hesitated. A gangster’s girl would probably wear something flask. But that would not suit Marion. Better to make her an apache type.
“Tie your hair up in a handkerchief and knot another one around your throat.”
“Let’s see what I’ve got. Come and help me choose.”
It was the first time that he had seen her room. It was very different from his. It was cool and light. A flowered wallpaper on a cream-white background with light chintz curtains and chair covers. There was a photograph of a school group above the mantelpiece, girls in pigtails and white long-sleeved blouses under dark blue pinafores, with badges on the pocket. There was a crucifix above her writing desk, with a photograph beside it of her mother, in court dress.
“There’s a bright-red scarf. What about that?” she said.
“And that canary yellow one for your head.”
She was wearing a light pale-blue frock, short, with a tight fitting bodice and a panier type skirt. She turned slowly, self-approvingly, before her mirror.
“Hadn’t I better make up a bit?”
“It wouldn’t do any harm.”
“I’ll raid Judy’s dressing table.”
Three minutes later, she came downstairs, garish with mascara and lipstick, a smile of triumph on her lips. “I really feel the part now,” she said.
She acted it as though she did. Seated beside him, in what was supposed to be the back room of a speakeasy, she half-closed her eyes as she fingered a long cigarette holder, letting the smoke drift across her eyes, speaking in a slow-drawled cockney. “Watcha mean that yer don’t trust me? Ain’t I bin your gal six weeks?”
She made it easy for him to play his role.
“You’re a swell kid, sugar, but if you shoot off that pretty mouth of yours …”
He put his hand under her chin. He tapped his fingers against her cheek. It was part pat, part slap. Her voice became a purr.
“ ’Ow could I be anythink but straight wiv yer?”
In the second scene, after his rival’s murder, he threw himself even more wholeheartedly into his part. Swaggering across the stage, he boasted of all that he would do now that his rival was removed.
“I’ll hang great swollen pearls about that neck of yours. You’ll hardly be able to lift your wrists for rocks.”
Her voice, in response, grew lower and more seductive. “I’ll let you make me beautiful for you.”
As he leaned over Marion, he caught Nina’s eye. She was smiling. There was approval and there was encouragement in her smile. As he made way for the other members of his team, he had a jubilant sensation that at last he was justified before these Englishers, that
part of his account with Judy was being squared. The thought was heady knowledge. He was sustained and excited by the same white heat that he had known sometimes at his easel when his subject caught him; when he was half-drunk with the excitement of creation, yet knew himself to be, at the same time, outside his medium, in complete control.
In the final scene, when he broke in upon the plot to murder him; when he stood with a revolver in his hand facing the group of startled gangsters; when he saw beyond them the audience closely attentive to his talk, amused and held by it, he had the sensation of dominating for the first time this group of foreigners. And when, his wisecracks finished, he caught Marion by the wrist, pulling her to her feet, he had the feeling that this dragging of her from the room was a symbol of his own achievement, that she was the prize of capture.
“Come along now, sugar. You’re coming for a long long ride with me.”
He dragged her from the room, entering into his part so completely that he pulled her right down the passage across the hall, into the small alcove where the hats were hung. As he stopped, the impetus of the force he had exerted, brought her breathless laughing against his chest. To steady her, his arms went round her.
“You were marvellous,” he said.
The alcove was lit indirectly from the hall. In the half-light, there was something curiously appealing in the contrast between the bizarre make-up that Was like a mask, and the pale-blue candor of her eyes.
“You’re very sweet,” he said, and bent his head.
He had meant it to be a very gentle kiss, a cousin’s kiss, but the excitement of the moment, something, too, in the way in which she moved a half-step closer as his arms went round her, made the kiss a real one. Her lips were very full and smooth and fresh. She sighed and drew away. The lipstick smudged across her cheeks gave her a very youthful look – like a child that had smeared its face with jam, waking in him the need to cherish and protect her.
“Darling,” she said.
It was spoken like a sigh. His arms tightened, and she drew closer into them. She wore no scent, but there was a fragrance of youth and health about her. In her tweeds, and even in her evening clothes, she had looked thin and undeveloped, but now, held close against him, he was conscious through every nerve cell of her firm young curves. The blood pounded along his veins. His heart was thudding. The excitement of the evening, the strain under which he had lived for the last six months, the added strain of the last four weeks, were mingled with the deep and growing fondness that he had come to feel for Marion.
“From the very first moment that I saw you I knew there was something very special between you and me,” he said.
She closed her eyes, her lips half parted; she flung back her head, exposing the long white line of her throat as though she were drinking thirstily.
“If only you knew how I’ve been longing to hear you say that,” she said.
She lifted her hands, taking his cheeks between them. Her hands were warm; a little damp, but very soft. “Darling,” she said, and raised herself upon her toes.
It was a shock for which nothing he had known had in any way prepared him. It was the very inexperience of the kiss that made it shattering: it had a purity, an intensity of passion of which only complete innocence is capable. “I’m the first person she’s ever really kissed,” he thought… and that was the last thing he thought. Another second, and he was past reflection, drowned in a surrender as complete as hers; a surrender so complete that he was unaware of footsteps in the hall; that he was unaware of interruption till a light was flashed above his head and he saw, staring at him, Judy and Sir Henry.
In Judy’s eyes, there was the same expression, intensified and emboldened, that he had seen there on his first night at Charlton when she had found him in the drawing room, showing Marion his pictures. There was a moment’s silence. The rescuing of the situation depended entirely on Judy.
She was in no mood to save it.
“I’m very sorry to have disturbed so romantic a moment,” she said lightly, “if it is a romantic moment, that’s to say. It’s always so hard to tell with you Americans. I don’t know if this means that it would ordinarily mean here in England that we are about to welcome a new son-in-law into the family or whether it is a variation of the American national custom of what is, I believe, called ‘the petting party.’”
To that there was for Francis one answer only; one answer only that could save the situation; one answer only that would make it possible for him to look Marion in the eyes again.
There was only one thing for him to do, to speak as light-heartedly as Judy had, “I’m afraid I can’t answer that completely. I’m afraid you came upon the scene too soon. I was just trying very hard to get Marion’s permission to ask you to accept me as a son-in-law, but I’m afraid I haven’t had time to get the answer yet; it’s up to Marion.”
That was the only answer. It was the answer, too, that with one part of himself he would have given anything to make. He could not make it though; there was no possibility of that. He stood there silent, the eyes of all three turned on him, Judy’s, challenging and belligerent, Sir Henry’s aloof, but watchful like the old diplomatic fox he was, Marion’s fond and trustful, confident that he would say that one thing which would not only save the situation, but open for her a way of life in which she could take pride and happiness.
It was at Marion that Francis looked, watching, as he stood there, silent, that look of trust change first to one of bewilderment, then to a shocked misery which seemed near despair, but which then very quickly, as she realized that he was not, after all, going to say the one thing she had longed to hear, changed to a steely resolution.
The whole change of expression did not take thirty seconds, but in that half-minute, there had come into her eyes the look of someone who had seen momentarily the Gorgon face to face. Something died in her that moment. The moment had forged for her the first scales of the armor that would defend her against the disillusionments of life, against too ready a readiness to except the best. The new person that Marion had become laughed lightly.
“Dear Judy, how very mid-Victorian. Of course it wasn’t anything. It was the moment and the mood. Too much champagne, I think. In fact, I’d be very wise to go straight to bed. Good night, Francis dear. I’ll see you in the morning.”
It was an effective exit. As she walked up the stairs, Sir Henry flashed at Judy a quick interrogatory glance. Such a glance as he had flashed at her at that first lunch party when the Renans had seemed about to quarrel. This time Judy did not appear to notice it. She changed the subject.
“In that case, I suppose we had better go back and give the other team a chance of doing a better charade than we did. I’m sure they will never have guessed our word. I do congratulate you, Francis. It was most successful.”
She slipped her arm through his, as they walked back to the drawing room.
It was the showdown right enough.
Chapter Twelve
Francis was up the next morning early, in the knowledge that no one except Sir Henry would be down to breakfast before half-past nine; Sunday being, as he had learned, the one morning on which Sir Henry made a solid breakfast.
He was correct in his supposition. Sir Henry was alone, with The Sunday Times propped before him on a paper rest. His welcome was not, as Francis also had foreseen, any the less cordial on account of the incident of the previous night.
“Good morning to you. I trust that you slept well. I think that you will find everything you need upon the sideboard. Sausages are the traditional English Sunday breakfast dish, but I can recommend the kidneys.”
There was the usual profusion of dishes along the electric heater. Francis helped himself to kidneys, bacon and a soft-boiled egg.
“I’m afraid that I have the only copy of The Sunday Times,” Sir Henry said. “But there’s The Observer there, and The News of the World if you feel frivolous.”
It was obvious that Sir Henry was in no mood for talk,
but it was for that precise purpose that Francis had risen early.
“I’ve been thinking that it was almost time for me to be moving on,” he said.
Sir Henry raised his head. His dignified handsome features expressed the concern appropriate to such a statement.
“Of course, my dear fellow, if you feel you must. It’s very good of you to have devoted so much time to us. I appreciate it very much and so does Judy.”
Sir Henry listened thoughtfully, nodding from time to time as Francis set out his reasons.
“I ought to do a certain number of London pictures, so that if I’m to go to Spain too, as I had hoped this summer …”
Sir Henry nodded sympathetically.
“I couldn’t agree more with you. We shall miss you very much. But we can’t interfere with your career; one must always put one’s work first, always. When did you think of leaving us?”
“Tomorrow.”
“So soon? Well, perhaps you are wise. Provided, of course, you regard it as a breaking rather than an ending of your visit. You might for instance like to leave some of your things here, to regard this as a pied-à-terre.”
“That’s very kind of you, but I travel light.”
“And very wise of you, but if we can be of any help to you…”
It could not have been arranged more smoothly. If Sir Henry had felt any relief at his guest’s departure, he had not betrayed it by one flicker of a muscle. He had given no indication of what he felt; but then he never had, he never would. Had he ever, Francis wondered, felt any jealousy, any resentment at his wife’s absorption in a young foreigner, or had he, knowing that he held all the cards, been content to play a waiting game? What had he thought? What did it matter what he had thought? It was over now.
With a heavy heart Francis walked out into the garden. It was a bright May morning. The sky was blue with pale flimsy clouds, drifting lazily across it. The copper beech by the rose garden was not yet in leaf, but the chestnuts were in full blossom in the drive. The daffodils at their roots were dead, but the gray-green water of the pond reflected the white and red and mauves of the rhododendrons flanking it. The archery with its tulip beds looked like a scene from a Dutch painting. It had been a wet bleak April. Morning after morning Judy had said, “If only you could see Charlton at its best, just once.” This was really the first time he had. The stucco walls shone in the morning sunlight, with an aspect of white gold that he had not yet seen on them; the same glow of gold that had been reflected in the picture over the mantelpiece at Mougins. Mougins, how long ago that seemed and tomorrow he would be on his way to London.